Web 2.0 Featured Article

According to an industry forecast released this week, the recent launch of Google’s (News - Alert) real-time search engine is poised to have a significant impact on the social media marketing industry and improve the results of campaigns.

“Google real-time search could have a huge impact on the landscape of the social media marketing industry,” said Robert Proctor, head of EMEA for Reality Digital, a San Francisco-based provider of Web community software. “It will hopefully place the onus on brands to maximize their marketing output in social media, as they stand to benefit from this activity now more than ever in terms of achieving consumer engagement and driving traffic to their Web site.”

Google’s new search functionality introduces new features that allow users to see live updates from people on sites such as Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published only seconds before, according to a Dec. 7 Google company blog post by Amit Singhal, a Google fellow.

“Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it’s happening, even if it’s not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn’t know about it beforehand,” Singhal wrote.

Google real-time search continually updates as events and conversations occur around the Web. The announcement that deals with Facebook (News - Alert) and MySpace have followed the previous agreements with Twitter and LinkedIn means that streams from a brand’s Facebook and MySpace pages will now have a direct impact on search engine results, and real-time updates from social networks will be visible on the search engine results pages themselves, Proctor said.

Reality Digital officials said that that such deals will have a significant impact on the social media marketing industry. The appearance of social media content in search engine results will serve to enhance the reach of social media chatter, and will therefore enhance the benefit of positive conversations.

The launch of real-time search means that any current and developing conversations on social networks will consequently have an ongoing effect on search results, and will serve to drive increased numbers of traffic to brand domains, company officials said.